Customer delight is everyone’s responsibility. Modern SMEs cannot afford to make their customers unhappy. If you don’t meet their expectations, they can publicly share their criticism online. It’s so easy nowadays for any customer, client, or happenstance bystander to share their instant discontent on the likes of Facebook Reviews, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or Google Reviews…
Customers can literally detonate your company’s reputation, even momentarily, at the touch of a button. So, receiving and sharing positive customer feedback is important. It can make a real difference and predict whether your business will grow or struggle.
In this week’s blog we share ways to delight your customers, and how you can use this success to steady your business, atop the ocean of customer opinion that drives it.
What Should You Do Well?
If you’re unsure about what you should be doing right to start with, there are five basics to receiving good customer feedback: Answer their questions, solve the problem they present, help your customer reach the goal they want to achieve, be enthusiastic, and be generous! Sounds like common sense, but there’s more to it than that…
- Answering customer questions: Customers come to a business because a product or service they sell has the potential to satisfy a need or desire they have. Prospects will have questions, quibbles, even anxieties as to whether they need your product or service. Make sure you have the answers, and that your staff have the answers too. Quality is key. Tell them about the product, your product in particular, its benefits, why is it better, why is it better value for money? Reach out to them on multiple channels. Use social media, online webshops, forums, chatbots. Be powerful with the use of visuals and demos.
- Solving the customer’s problem: Offering a solution to the problem your customer needs to solve, or finding a way to achieve the goal they’re working towards is, after all, why they’ve come to you in the first place — so don’t leave them in doubt. Offer your customers the solutions that most consistently match their individual desires, needs, and preferences.
- Helping your customer to reach their goal(s): Customer success is a result of helping customers see value in your product, guiding them to purchase, and helping them achieve their goals with the use of your product or service. Pleasing customers is not just for the now, it may be a lifestyle product; a luxury high cost service. Think Pinterest groups, loyalty cards, customer-only events. You should think of customer delight like this: how can you best, most effectively provide value to someone, so that they can extract value from your product or service?
- Being enthusiastic: Smile and the world smiles with you! Make sure in every interaction with potential and current customers, your company’s voice is enthusiastic, fun, and welcoming. Offer a real, warm, personalised, human interaction that rewards your customer and leaves them happy, fulfilled, and educated. They will love you for it.
- Being generous: Contemporary customers are all about the experience! From champagne breakfasts at sunrise to all expenses paid road trips for brand marque fans; you name it, you should think of it before your competitors do. If your budget is small but your heart is big, try small promotions such as loyalty cards with a tenth purchase freebie, or even competitions for dinner for two on Facebook.
Delighting your customers doesn’t have to be over the top, but it has to resonate with them, engage them, and help you make it into their good books!
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How Should You Capture Feedback?
Remember, just as one bad review can cost you future customers, many good referrals can send many new customers your way. Major marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay rely on product reviews and seller feedback to show buyers the sellers that deliver on price, quality and customer service. Feedback will help you to understand why customers are buying now, or what they might purchase in the future. And, when it comes to converting browsers into buyers online, customer reviews really do make a difference!
- Testimonials: Real customer reviews can persuade a buyer who is on the fence to proceed to purchase. Whether that be testimonials on your website, in your direct marketing campaigns, or online in an infomercial, recommendations from customers that match the persona of your buyers will be most persuasive.
- Social Media: Social media is ubiquitous. The average customer has up to five social media accounts, and spends around 1 hour and 40 minutes browsing these networks every day. Customer following, endorsing, commenting, and sharing is a way to measure awareness of your brands. Regularly keeping an eye on your Facebook Insights, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram analytics to name but a few, will help you to spot trends, engage with customers directly, and build relationships, brand loyalty, and brand presence in the eyes of future customers. Think of social as your ‘street cred rating’, and be sure to spend time thinking about whether ‘social selling’ would be something your company could do well at.
- Word Of Mouth: Make your business, product or service memorable. If your customers remember you, they will think of you and recommend you. Whether that be word of mouth referrals, recommendations or expressing satisfaction by way of case study participation or otherwise, people have a tendency to remember what people say. Better they remember the positive than the negative!
- Surveys/Online Feedback Forms: Having a structured way for customers to get in touch with you is a vital way for you to capture their feedback. Online feedback forms and customer satisfaction surveys aligned with your email and direct marketing campaigns can be a great way to understand why your business is doing well, or not. The form should be one-click and really easy to fill out, or easy to find on your site. Make it easy. Keep it short and to the point or you may miss out on minor or major feedback which could improve your overall business.
- Send Emails: One of the best ways to get reviews is by sending a friendly email asking for it after a customer has made a purchase. Detailed product reviews on your site can really help with SEO and boost your product’s page in search result rankings. Let’s face it, honest feedback from customers can also help influence buying decisions and address any areas of your business that need improvement.
It’s a win-win. Capturing positive customer feedback, and sharing it, is not a happy byproduct of your success; it will help you gain new business. You can constantly improve your business while increasing the likelihood of more purchases. So, when a customer is pleased with your product or service, and it solves a problem they have, capture that sentiment and share it where possible. If you do, their feedback will be literally worth its weight in gold!
If you’re planning new marketing drives to increase your impact and make your customers like you better, then Linked Finance can provide business loans to cover just such an investment. Give us a call today on 01 906 0300.
